Finally, a politician has the balls to speak-out about what is required to achieve affordable housing in Australia’s mining towns: freeing-up land supply. From the Sunshine Coast Daily:
UNDER a radical new scheme, Federal Member for Kennedy, Bob Katter, claims he can reduce the cost of house blocks in mining towns to as little as $25,000 and put an immediate halt to sky-rocketing rents and house prices in Queensland’s resource-rich areas.
The average house block in the Central Queensland mining town, Emerald, currently costs around $168,000…
Explaining how the affordable housing scheme would work, Katter said, “We open up the land,”
“… the price of land has got nothing to do with anything else except the restrictions placed upon land subdivisions by government. Remove those restrictions and I can give you housing prices that you can only dream of.”
“We sold land in 1990 in Charters Towers for $6000 a block, and any time the price went over $6000 we’d just dump another 20 or 30 blocks on to the market.
“When that power was taken away from the local Mines Department, that price shot up to $126,000 for a housing block in Charters Towers.”
Under his scheme Katter says a block of land would cost around $25,000 to $30,000 and subdivisions would be born virtually overnight with the use of prefabricated homes. The required infrastructure such as extension of water supply, sewerage and road systems would be supplemented in part from the 20 per cent return from the Royalties for Regions scheme…
“The really big contributing factor is greenies, and the town planners, the local blue heeler dog, they all get in the act. By the time they’ve all had their hit at you, you’re looking at retirement.
“It goes on for years and years by the time you please all the government instrumentalities.”
“…we will give to you the cheapest housing available in the world…”
That Katter’s plan to open-up land to accommodate Emerald’s growing population has been labelled “radical” just goes to show how screwed-up housing policy has become in this country. His price tag of $25,000 to $30,000 a block is also similar to levels achieved in Texas’ major metropolitan areas.
I hope that Katter’s plan gets up and acts as a template for the rest of Australia.
